Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 July 1

= July 1 =

Foreign Accents
I speak USA English (Northeast). I want to learn how to use a British accent or a German one, etc. However, I am horrible at mimicking. So, is there somewhere I can go so I can read how the pronounce the words phonetically in the different accents? --Reticuli88 (talk) 15:41, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The best point to start would probably by the IPA, since you possibly need an understanding of the sounds you want to make. From there you could go here to learn about the differences in vocalization between English accents or here for the German ones. From there to the accent it is just be only a short way. Or you could simply try listening to foreign speakers either on the Internet or otherwise. --91.6.52.81 (talk) 16:20, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I did a very quick google and came across a set of videos on youtube about learning the British accent. Here's the first in the series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqU0pcpuIjY.  The other videos in the series are on the right-hand side, and focus on specific vowel sounds.  I must say, being British, that they aren't very good (the comments are to that effect, also), but it is a good start, I suppose.  Northeast Americans tend to pronounce their vowels very flat and from the back of the mouth, whereas the British bring the vowels forward and "round" them off, so to speak.  Just knowing that can help you begin practising.  You've already got a rough idea how the British accent sounds, so start by moving your vowels forward in your mouth and trying to achieve the same effect.  I haven't used the proper terms or confused you with IPA stuff deliberately, because from what I can tell, most people don't understand them anyway!   Mae din \talk 16:37, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Don't bother following that link, she speaks what Americans call a "British accent", not what any actual British people speak. (It's close to received pronunciation, but it's not it.) --Tango (talk) 17:36, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it is pretty terrible, :-/ But I still don't think it's a bad place to start, to at least start training to the very different sounds and mouth shapes.  Besides, the OP hasn't made clear what sort of British accent she/he wants to learn.  Maybe they really do want to do a comedy mock British accent, .  Anyway, the best advice is to actually live in Britain.  It only took me a few months to blend in.   Mae din \talk 17:59, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree - being immersed in the accent is the best way, despite what the woman in that video says. Listen and practice, you don't really need to worry about the details of the phonetics unless they is a specific sound you can't get right. --Tango (talk) 18:05, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Good god, her accent is DIRE. What she calls the "short O" is one of the key vowel sounds that Americans generally get very wrong, and she is no exception. Don't, whatever you do, follow her advice: she seems totally unaware that thought and hot are not supposed to rhyme when speaking with an English accent, for example. She sounds about as British as Anthony LaPaglia when he "pawped aap" as Daphne's brother in Frasier. Malcolm XIV (talk) 20:39, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * This description reminds me of the time a TV production of Poirot (or some such) had an actress say "My lahst shoe!"; I thought "your last shoe, wha?" before working out that she was trying to say "lost" in American. —Tamfang (talk) 04:36, 22 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I was actually waiting for someone to put up the very video's Maedin did. Do not use them, they are incredibly awful and mixed up. Seriously, she seems to be speaking some strange mixture of cockney and RP, with a few extra edges from neither. Some of her words start in one accent and finish in another! Only learn from those videos if you want a random comedy accent that doesn't resemble anything spoken by anyone. 89.168.19.118 (talk) 22:14, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I particularly liked her pronunciation of "coffee". It was a good approximation of an RP 'o' with the 'ee' coming from somewhere in Yorkshire, I think... --Tango (talk) 22:29, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

I have no plans to visit Britain. I am just looking for, I guess, proper British accent, the kind you would hear in an British news program. I don't want to start listening and trying to repeat it. I would rather read it and see how it is pronouced phonetically. Is there a place where I can read it first? --Reticuli88 (talk) 18:21, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * British news readers stopped all using the same accent years ago. What they used to speak was received pronunciation. The "phonology" section of that article gives an introduction to how the accent works, but it isn't designed to be a how-to guide. I'm don't know of any good how-to guides (I'm not going to google it because I suspect the internet is full of bad guides and I would struggle to tell them apart). Be warned, if you do learn RP you will sound rather "posh". There is a lot of reverse snobbery in the UK, so that isn't necessarily a good thing. --Tango (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * (ec) Can you read IPA? If not, trying to figure out what it sounds like from reading it is pointless. And even if you can read IPA, you'll never achieve a passable Received Pronunciation accent (which I assume is what you mean by a "proper British accent, the kind you would hear in a British news program") if you only read about it and don't also listen and repeat. +Angr 18:32, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Angr, you know the answer to that question already. Statistically speaking, nobody uses IPA and nobody understands it.  Tempshill (talk) 23:24, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
 * That doen't alter the fact that everybody should use IPA, especially people wanting to learn pronunciation by reading. Algebraist 23:32, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It isn't true anyway. Tens of thousands of people understand IPA and use it every day. Only people who can't be bothered to spend the 45 minutes required to learn it like to go around claiming, "Statistically speaking, no one uses it". +Angr 06:06, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Tens of thousands? Tens of millions is more likely, probably more. Pretty much everybody who learns a foreign language is exposed to IPA in one way or another these days (in Europe at least). To begin with, textbooks of English typically employ IPA. — Emil J. 10:41, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, tens of millions have been exposed to it and many of them probably even remember some of it ten years after their most recent exposure. What I said is, tens of thousands use it every day. +Angr 11:05, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * . Tempshill (talk) 16:44, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm not saying that I will do away with listening and mimcking. I want to start out by reading it phonetically. For instance, in English to German dictionaries, often times they will have the English word, the German translation then the way to say it phonetically: ie: ich liebe dich - "ee-hch lee-beh dee-hch". But in this case, I want it to be an English word that would spell out how it be pronounced in a different language. --Reticuli88 (talk) 18:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * That kind of phonetic spelling only gives you an approximation and is used to help people understand foreign spellings not learn foreign accents. The differences between different English accents are generally too subtle to show up in that kind of representation. --Tango (talk) 18:52, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, approximation is good because I am no where near understanding how to get this accent. Once I get this approximation, perhaps then I will listen and lastly try to mimick it. Sorry, but that is my learning process. --Reticuli88 (talk) 18:59, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * American pronunciations are approximately the same as British pronunciations, though, so you won't get anywhere. If you want to represent it in writing you need something like IPA which has "107 distinct letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks" rather than the Latin alphabet which has just 26 letters.--Tango (talk) 19:05, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

It's worth pointing out that the idea of a "British accent" is something of a solecism. If you are serious about sounding like someone from Britain, the first thing to do is stop asking people how to speak with a "British" accent, and instead ask them how to speak with an English accent (or a Scots accent, or a Welsh accent, if you prefer). Otherwise, all you'll get is self-appointed experts like the YouTube woman linked to above. Who, in their right mind, would take advice on adopting an accent from somebody who isn't even a native of the country in question?

The second thing to bear in mind is that it's not simply a question of substituting one set of vowel sounds for another. English and American accents also differ in diction, inflection, emphasis, vocabulary, etc etc. It's very difficult to get it right without one-on-one tuition. Malcolm XIV (talk) 21:08, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * There is no such thing as an "English accent" either, for that matter. There is more variation between things like Received pronunciation, Scouse, Cockney, Geordie, etc. (all English) than there is between any American accents I've heard. Also, being a pedant, I must point out that differences in vocabulary would constitute a dialect rather than an accent. --Tango (talk) 21:52, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Up to a point. There is such a thing as an English accent; you've named four examples above. My point was not that there is a standard English accent (there isn't); it was that they are invariably called English accents as opposed to British accents. Americans' idea of what constitutes a "British" accent is almost invariably an English accent – usually, RP, Cockney, or some foul hybrid of the two.
 * To the OP: the International Dialects of English Archive has a few recordings of genuine accents (with fiendishly complicated IPA transcriptions) here . Malcolm XIV (talk) 21:59, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, we clearly agree, we're just getting hung up on semantics (which is appropriate for the language ref desk!). There are accents which are English, there is no accent called "English" (it is just used as a description, not a name). --Tango (talk) 22:12, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Malcolm: a native of the country in question might well not be sensitive to what's distinctive in her native speech! —Tamfang (talk) 04:58, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd try listening to Radio4 which is on the internet too.A wide variety of UK accents will be heard there.hotclaws 23:12, 5 July 2009 (UTC)


 * My public library has books for actors on how to speak in many accents/dialects, so that a midwestern American can play a German cop, a London street tough, a French chef, or whatever in a play. These books specifically point out how to fake an accent, and would be a faster way of learning to do an accent as the OP requested than fumbling through some concatenation of IPA symbols. I have heard Brit actors doing a nice job on an "American accent" in a BBC program, until they utterly reveal their origins with one muffed word. The lady in the Youtube recordings has a pretty strong regional accent to start with. It is little wonder her "British" speech sounds peculiar to folks from various parts of the UK, whose accents sound odd to each other. Is there comparable funny example of an English speaker demonstrating how to speak with an "American" accent? Edison (talk) 20:39, 7 July 2009 (UTC)